Flashpoint (35 page)

He’d laughed, and she was led away.

On the stairs going down, she passed Will Schroeder, in handcuffs, being led up.

He’d been badly beaten, and he peered at her through swollen eyes. “Tess, I’m so sorry,” he said. “This is all my fault.” He was shoved hard, and he fell to his knees.

The guards who were leading Tess pulled her down the stone stairs much too quickly, and she stumbled and slipped, falling and sliding down six or seven steps on her rear and scraping her elbow all over again.

“Don’t hurt her,” she could hear Will shouting as they were dragged in two different directions. “Don’t you bastards hurt her!”

Jimmy followed Decker past the posted signs announcing intent to demolish, through a basement door, and into the boarded up old Hotel Français.

H.F.
was all that the message said, the message that was stuck to the inside wall of the shed.
H.F.
scribbled on a scrap of paper had meant nothing to Jimmy. All he’d known for sure—to his growing despair—was that Tess hadn’t written it.

“This doesn’t mean she’s not okay,” Decker had said to him.

Deck knew his way around the decrepit hotel without turning on his penlight. Apparently this was where he and Sophia had come that night that he . . . hadn’t done her taxes.

They went up a flight of stairs, and then up another, and . . .

Tess wasn’t here. Jimmy knew she wasn’t here. And yet, when they went into a dusty old ballroom and Sophia appeared from the shadows with another slightly taller, slender figure beside her, his heart had leapt.

But it was only Khalid.

“Thank goodness,” Sophia said, hands clasped tightly in front of her. “We heard the explosion, thought the hotel might’ve—”

“We didn’t hear anything inside the hotel,” Decker told her. “But after we were on the street, we saw the fire. Where’s Dave and—”

“Fuck Dave. Where’s Tess?” Jimmy asked.

“Dave went out to get something,” Sophia told Decker. “I don’t know what. And Tess . . .”

She looked at Jimmy, and even though he couldn’t see her face clearly in the pale moonlight, he knew. Something bad had happened. He just never imagined exactly how bad until Sophia put it into words: “Padsha Bashir came out to Rivka’s house. Somehow he knew you were looking for Sayid’s laptop. He took Tess.”

Padsha Bashir.

Took.

Jimmy didn’t realize he needed support until Decker had his arm around him, until Deck helped him to the floor and pushed his head between his legs.

Jesus Christ, when had he turned into a freaking little fainting girl?

But God, oh God, Bashir had Tess. . . .

Dave chose that moment to return with a clatter. But he gave Jimmy little more than a curious look as he set a large canvas bag on the floor.

“Weapons Are Us,” he announced. “Murph told me where he kept something called his Worst-Case Scenario Bag. Anyone need some C4 or a grenade launcher?”

Jimmy reached for the bag, ready to cowboy up and, with a 9mm room broom in one hand, and yes, thanks, an AK-47 with attached grenade launcher in the other, kick down the door to Bashir’s palace, shouting Tess’s name, like a bad mix of Rambo and Rocky.

Decker, always able to read his mind with great accuracy, pulled the bag out of Jimmy’s reach.

“We’ve got the laptop,” he told Dave and Sophia. “But we’re going to need to revise my extraction plan.”

The guards laughed as Tess cowered, crying, in the corner of the tiny cell.

Play the part, play the part, play the part.
Jimmy’s voice echoed in her head.

There were five of them.

One or maybe two, she could’ve taken. But not five.

It wasn’t hard to call forth the emotion that brought tears streaming down her cheeks.

The Grande Hotel has fallen.

The door—modern, compared to this ancient cell—closed with a clang that Tess welcomed, because along with locking her in, it locked those five guards out.

She crouched there, crying, as she took a silent inventory of her latest injuries. Elbow—burned. Tailbone—bruised. Ankle—slightly twisted, but the pain was nothing she wouldn’t be able to work through.

But it made her think of Jimmy and his dings, and her sobbing sounded even more authentic.

I’ll do whatever it takes to find you.

She didn’t doubt that for one second. The only thing that would keep Jimmy Nash from kicking in the palace doors was death.

If he was still alive, he was already on his way over here. Tess knew that for a fact. She had to plan for that, be ready for him.

But how?

Step one, get out of this cell.

The last of the guards finally got bored with watching her and went back down the hall.

Coming in, Tess had seen a small table and—good news—a single chair at the entrance to this long row of cells. A stack of books, some papers, the remains of an unpleasant-looking dinner on a tray. There was some kind of light switch on the wall, along with a telephone.

A telephone? A
telephone
.

Her own phone had been confiscated, which was moot because their communications system was completely down. The last undamaged sat-dish was in Decker’s backpack, sitting on the tile floor of this palace lobby, with the other equipment Bashir’s men had taken from Rivka’s house.

And yet, upstairs, Bashir had spoken to someone on a telephone.

Yes, it was possible that phone was little more than a palace intercom system, confined to this building. But maybe . . .

Step two, retrace her steps back to that lobby in hopes that that pile of equipment hadn’t yet been moved. Help herself to Decker’s backpack. Head for the roof, find a deserted spot, and set up the sat-dish, so that when Jimmy came after her, his phone would work.

Step three, access one of Bashir’s phones and . . .

It wasn’t as impossible as it sounded. Tess had noticed coming in that security in the lobby, as well as the rest of the palace, was lax. It was a common enough mistake. There were so many guards around the outside of the palace and at each of the gates, it was assumed that anyone inside was supposed to be here. They’d passed quite a few servants on their trip to this cell, and none of them had been so much as acknowledged—let alone challenged—by Tess’s guards.

But first, step one.

Head still down as she pretended to cry, Tess peeked out from beneath her arm. The hallway was empty. She quietly stood, making those weeping sounds more softly now, and looked around.

The cell was barely twelve feet by six feet. It had the same type of stone walls and floors as the cell in the police station, but the door was modern—a set of metal bars that slid open along a mechanized track.

The ceiling was high—the largest dimension of the cell was from floor to ceiling, at about fifteen feet—and it wasn’t stone, but rather wood. It was made of rows of what looked like two-by-fours, set side by side by side.

Tess went to the door and peered down at the end of the hall. She was right about that single chair. All but one of the guards had left.

He was the one who’d had his hands all over her on the walk downstairs, copping a feel every chance he got. Good. He deserved a gonad displacement.

Moving back into the cell, Tess looked up at the ceiling and spit on her hands, rubbing them together.

She placed both hands on the wall in front of her, then reached back with one foot and then the other, bracing them against the opposite wall. She was just the right height. With her arms pressing against the one wall, her feet against the other, she could walk backwards, shuffling her hands, up and up and up and up.

In his movies, Jackie Chan always made it look so easy, but it wasn’t. Her arms and legs trembled from the effort. Afraid to exhaust herself on her trial run, she came back down.

Tess then took off her jeans and shirt, putting her boots and the robe back on.

She took her time, artfully arranging her clothes on the floor in the farthest corner from the door. She stepped back, satisfied.

It looked as if she’d made like the Wicked Witch of the West and melted, melted away, leaving only her clothes behind.

She spit on her hands again and climbed, this time all the way to the top, where she wouldn’t be seen by a guard standing in the hall.

Taking a deep breath, Tess let out a blood-chilling scream.

Decker sat, listening to Dave and Nash arguing about the best way into—and out of—Padsha Bashir’s palace, where Tess was being held.

In the glow of a penlight, Sophia had drawn a layout of the place, marking the location in the basement where she believed Tess would be held. She called it a dungeon, for lack of a better name, since it was underground and apparently very unpleasant. Dave had taken a turn with the handmade little map and put Xs over the parts of the building that had been damaged in the quake.

Sophia was silent now. She’d been lost in her own thoughts ever since Decker had told her that, before discovering Tess had been taken, his plan had been to head north. Decker would take Sophia and Sayid’s laptop and hide with them in the mountains.

Dave, Nash, and Tess would stay behind to clean up and discard their extra equipment, and pack their clothes. They’d leave aboard a commercial airliner. Their luggage would undergo an extensive search, but the police and Bashir’s men would, of course, find nothing. Once out of the country, they would contact Tom Paoletti and arrange for an air extraction.

A Seahawk helicopter, probably filled with SEALs from Team Sixteen, who were “training” in nearby Pakistan, would race into K-stani airspace to some desolate mountain location, and pull aboard the laptop—and Sophia and Deck—and race back to safety.

It was the perfect solution to getting Sophia out of this hellhole of a country. Put her in possession of the laptop— No, why take chances? Handcuff her to the damn thing so they couldn’t take it without her.

Decker couldn’t imagine getting the laptop out of K-stan any other way, not with Bashir and the police and every major and minor warlord in the region hunting for it.

And while the U.S. Government wouldn’t make the effort to pull Sophia out, they would provide—and pay for—a military extraction to get their hands on al-Qaeda’s future plans.

But now they were in a bind. Their cover was blown—none of them would be able to leave via airliner. Not now. And communications were down. Getting any kind of message to Tom Paoletti was going to be a real challenge.

Nash had gone out to retrieve the sat-dish Tess had put on the church tower, but the last aftershock had knocked the power pack loose. It had ripped free from the dish, tumbling to the ground.

Even if they could find an alternative power source, their comspesh—the one person who had even the slightest chance of patching it together and getting it running—was a prisoner in Bashir’s palace.

Thanks, Nash pointed out, to Will Schroeder.

Which wasn’t really that much of an exaggeration.

Best Decker could figure was that the reporter had attracted Bashir’s attention by his investigation of the secret police compound at 68 Rue de Palms. If the police had started following Will, who’d stumbled upon that taxi driver who’d picked up Sayid at the Grande Hotel, and the police had then questioned the taxi driver and found out that Will was asking for information about Sayid . . . Well, they would certainly have brought that to Bashir’s attention. And Bashir would have insisted Will continue to be followed, and when Will had come to their home base at Rivka’s this afternoon . . .

Well, it was done now.

Nash was running out of patience, pacing in and out of the candlelight. He was ready to walk up to the palace gate, ring the bell, and kill everyone who got between him and Tess.

Dave, however, wanted it all choreographed exactly. “How are you going to get in?” he asked, including Decker in the conversation. “That place is a fortress—don’t underestimate their ability to keep you out. And that damaged area is going to be heavily guarded. You’re going to have one heck of a body count, and that’s going to result in discovery—they’ll know you’re there within minutes. You’re going to have to know where Tess is, free her, and then you’re going to need some kind of vehicle to get you out of there.”

The plan now was to send Dave into the mountains with Sophia and the laptop. Decker and Nash would enter Bashir’s palace, find Tess, grab her, and run. They’d all attempt to meet in several days and make the long, dangerous hike across the mountains and out of Kazbekistan together.

Nash and Dave had started arguing over the pros and cons of taking one of Bashir’s own humvees to muscle their way out of the palace.

Sophia spoke right over them. “Deck.”

“Yeah.”

She had her arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold—which couldn’t be the case in this heat.

“I can get us inside,” she said.

Dave and Nash both fell silent.

Decker couldn’t believe what she was offering. “Are you suggesting—”

“That you walk up to the front gate,” Sophia said. “All three of you. You’ll need other clothes—traditional K-stani robes. But you’ll be able to carry as many weapons in with you as you want. No one’s going to challenge you, because you’ll be there to collect the reward—and to deliver me to Bashir.”

“Dear God, Sophia,” Dave breathed, speaking for all of them. Well, except maybe Nash, who was nodding.

“There’s a holding area just inside the main door,” she told them. “A lobby, if you will. The captain of the guard will have us wait there while he tries to figure out what to do with me—and with you. Because when we get there, Bashir will be asleep.”

“Sophia,” Decker started. How could she suggest this?

“This is good,” Nash interrupted. “This is really good. While you’re waiting there, I’ll slip away, find Tess. We’ll meet over here.” He tapped the area on the penciled map where Dave said Bashir’s armored trucks were garaged.

She was sitting there, scared to death at the idea of coming face-to-face with Bashir again, and yet offering . . .

“It’s likely that the captain of the guard will try to take me downstairs,” Sophia said. “He’ll probably offer you rooms for the night so you can meet with Bashir and collect your reward tomorrow. If you insisted on staying with me, though, he might just go ahead and put us all in one room until morning.”